Artiistic director Owen Smith and show director Michael LoPorto during a rehersal of the Park Playhouse production of Annie Get Your Gun at the Wasington Park Lakehouse in Albany,New York 7/03/2010.( Michael P. Farrell / Times Union )

While rejoicing in the holiday gift of nearly $6.5 million in economic-development funds from the state last week, arts and cultural organizations in the greater Capital Region and North Country receiving the awards said that they also affirm the arts' important role in the economy.

The state's 10 regions will share nearly $716 million through the competitive grant system. Of that, $82.8 million will be de divided among recipients in an eight-county that includes the Capital Region, with about $4.8 million going toward 18 grants to local arts and cultural organizations, and another $1.6 million to arts nonprofits in the North Country.

Awards range from $5,200 to fund an internship at the Slate Valley Museum in Granville to $2.9 million to Proctors in Schenectady to expand the heating and cooling it provides to buildings around the downtown theater complex. (Proctors also got three more grants totaling an additional $605,000.) The Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake was awarded $1.2 million for renovations and improvements; two Hudson Valley historic sites that were painters' homes, the Thomas Cole House in Catskill and Frederic Church's Olana estate in Hudson, will get $500,000 and $195,000, respectively; and nine organizations or theaters were awarded funding of $17,000 to $100,000 for digital projectors.

"This is a huge boon for us," said Owen Smith, managing director of the Palace Theatre in Albany, which will get $76,500 to put toward a digital projector. (It has already raised the remaining funds needed for the $107,000 machine and installation.) The projector should be operational by the end of January, allowing the Palace to greatly expand its film series and potentially show screenings of live-streamed events and arts broadcasts. Smith is also producing artistic director of Park Playhouse, which will receive $40,000 for the purchase of sound and lighting equipment that, for the past 25 years, the theater company has had to rent every summer for its productions in Albany's Washington Park.

The Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany won three grants totaling $171,000: one for renovation of the exterior of the museum's historic Rice House and Rice House Annex, two for marketing efforts for the exhibit "The Mystery of the Albany Mummies," open through June.

"All of the statistics prove it: The arts bring people in," said Tammis Groft, the museum's executive director and chief curator. "That translates into economic development and jobs."

Nationally, the arts contribute more than $135 billion in activity to the economy every year, according to the study "Arts & Economic Prosperity IV," published in 2010 by the advocacy organization Americans for the Arts. A Times Union survey at the time pegged the local impact at $154 million from 170 organizations with annual audiences totaling more than 3 million.

"We pride ourselves on enriching people's lives by bringing beauty and meaning to the community in an aesthetic way," said the ASO's Miller. "But the fact that (arts groups) received these very competitive grants is a great endorsement to how valuable the arts are in economic form, too."